WoW Classic is no longer classic enough for many players. A new initiative is therefore venturing a new start for the old gaming experience on a server.
Experience World of Warcraft as it was in its early days. WoW Classic wanted to offer exactly this experience in mid-2019.
However, its release is now so far behind that an economy could also be established here and the market in the game suffers from inflation. Now a few thousand players found themselves wanting to do it all over again.
Tabula Rasa
The group unites under the name “The Fresh Crusade” and currently counts around 1,300 participants. On March 5, 2021, they want to use one of the least populated PvP servers of World of Warcraft: Classic and start completely from scratch.
They explained to Eurogamer how they came up with the idea: It was triggered by Blizzard not announcing any new servers for the launch of The Burning Crusade.
By taking this step, the initiative hopes to once again revive the community feeling and level experience that can hardly be found on existing servers.
As Caszhar, founder of the initiative, explains, you usually level up to level 60 on these alone, because there are no longer enough newcomers. You have to ignore dungeons and the like, because you rarely find groups.
However, the question remains open how long the desired feeling will last. After all, some participants of “The Fresh Crusade” will also find more time to play than others and thus level away from them.
Besides, players nowadays have much more background knowledge about the game mechanics, which allows them to level up faster than in the early days.
Playing without messenger influence
Another problem players face on traditional servers are bots and the ability to purchase in-game currency for real money. Since AI-controlled characters thus collect all resources and sell them expensively in the auction house, legitimate players have a much harder time making gold with crafting or the like.
Bots do exist on servers with low populations, but they have a hard time influencing the economy. This is because the players on them usually don’t buy gold and thus can’t afford the overpriced items anyway.
What does Blizzard do?
The developer of WoW: Classic explained in the past why it is so difficult to take action against bots and cheaters. Especially the collection of clear evidence is very complicated and can take quite some time.
Nevertheless, in 2020 the team was able to look back at more than 74,000 banned accounts that were proven to have used bot programs.
